Problem Solved: Pizza

A conversation had changed everything and the metaphorical light bulb had been lit. In summary, we wanted to help combat a symptom of homelessness, hunger, by allowing the customer do nothing more than buying his/her lunch or dinner. In principle a simple idea, but at this stage nothing more than a name, Share A Slice. I was still working in the city, battling the rigid dichotomy of financial security or a plucky idea, the key question still had to be answered:

What would we do and how would we do it?

It’s amazing how your view of the world begins to change when you have an idea in your head. You automatically become more analytical, you start noticing smaller things and start asking more questions. One thing you should know about me is that I am a foodie and I love eating, contrary to what my slender frame might suggest (metabolism game strong). The first decision we had to make was, what did we want to sell? We wanted to use a food which had broad appeal and most of all something that we liked eating, because if we weren’t passionate about out product no one else would be. And so the eating began, until we decided there was no other option than Pizza. Whilst eating copious amounts of the stuff, I was watching the second season of Aziz Ansari’sMaster of None where he was learning to make Pasta in Modena, Italy and it is safe to say I began to romanticise the idea of visiting Italy to learn first hand, how to authentically make our food of choice and so we did. We packed our bags, flew to Naples and learnt how to make pizza, cheers Aziz.

We decided we would sell authentic wood fired pizza and for each slice we sold, we would donate one to a critical community in need of hot food.

That left us with the other question; How? Please find below, aptly drawn pizza diagram to demonstrate how the process works for you, the customer.

1. Decide which pizza you would like and when ordering you will receive a golden ball/token. Upon receiving your pizza, hand in your golden ball/token. This token is a key part of the process, it represents both your pizza and the one to be donated and distributed to our critical community. The power is in your hands.

2. These tokens get handed to the real hero’s in this process, our charity partners, who distribute to their community.

3. We pitch up at different spaces in The Mona Pizza, our mobile pizza trailer, and those with tokens can get a free slice of freshly made hot Pizza, no questions asked. They are also entitled to keep a hold of those tokens, as with the sporadic nature of receiving food for those in this community, the need is greater on some days than others.

And so there we had it, the two major questions were answered. What followed was the process of getting this into reality and serving our very first Pizza as Share A Slice.